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Interactive Agenda Setting in the Social Sciences – Interdisciplinarity Elizabeth Shove & Paul Wouters

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Interactive Agenda Setting in the Social Sciences – Interdisciplinarity Elizabeth Shove & Paul Wouters Interactive agenda setting in the social sciences – Interdisciplinarity Elizabeth Shove & Paul Wouters Introduction In this background paper we review a selection of reports and documents written about interdisciplinarity in the social sciences. We do so with the aim of provoking and informing discussion about how interdisciplinary research agendas emerge, stabilise and disappear. The concept of interdisciplinary is particularly relevant when thinking about research agenda setting in the social sciences. For example, in our workshop about research centres, the wish to promote interdisciplinarity seemed to be a key motivation for the creation of new teams and groups. Science policy makers and research managers around the world routinely see interdisciplinarity as a progressive force that helps break the shackles of narrow-minded academic specialisation. This is a core theme in Mode II knowledge production as characterised by Gibbons with reference to the UK research system in particular (Gibbons 1994; Nowotny 2001). Interdisciplinarity is important for many research centres and the ESRC is clearly not the only science agency to invest in teams that span several disciplines. New grand funding schemes such as the UK e-science programme (Hey 2002) and the US initiative in creating new cyberinfrastructures for science and education revolve around an intuition about the value of being interdisciplinary (Nentwich 2003). In the first part of this paper we take stock of claims made about interdisciplinary research: why is it needed, whose agendas it engages with, what is special about it, and how might it be organised and evaluated. The second part offers a critique of the reasoning on which many of these claims rest. Interdisciplinarity as ‘a good thing’ Forster begins a recent report for the ESRC with the following words “the value of undertaking interdisciplinary research (IDR) lies in combining knowledge or methods to analyse specific issues or problems and creating new insights” (2003: 1). By implication, interdisciplinary research agendas are strongly tied to non-academic concerns and priorities: interdisciplinary research is quite simply required to address the ‘complex problems of the modern world’ Scottish Universities Research Policy Consortium (SURPC) (1997). As Conway puts it, ‘‘many of the practical challenges of the future are inherently interdisciplinary’ (1995: 3-4). The image here is one which new rounds of real-world problems generate fresh scientific challenges. If they are to engage with these questions at all, researchers have to cross ‘boundaries to achieve novel insights against a slower moving backdrop of disciplinary institutions’ (SURPC 1997). Forster continues: “complex themes and problems can often be better understood using methods and concepts drawn from a range of disciplines rather than traditional single discipline approaches” (2003: 22). Amongst other suggestions, he proposes that the ESRC develops an explicit strategy for interdisciplinarity and that it sets up a special unit to gather and disseminate information about interdisciplinary research to the social science community. 1 Like others before (Hoch 1993; Tait and Lyall 2001; SURPC 1997), Forster’s report treats interdisciplinarity as an unqualified ‘good’ and as something that has to be actively promoted and cultivated. The common understanding is that institutional structures – in particular, those relating to the funding and organisation of universities, to publication and reputation building and to the incentives and reward structures of contemporary academic life – impede interdisciplinarity, hence the need for deliberate effort to overcome the resulting ‘barriers’. In this context, it is widely accepted that interdisciplinary research is more risky, more costly and more time consuming than ‘normal’ or disciplinary research. Tait and Lyall are, for instance of the view that ‘interdisicplinary work tends to be both slightly slower to deliver and also more expensive’ (2001: 20) and Forster agrees, interdisciplinary research is ‘potentially more risky and more costly than mono- disciplinary research’ (2003: 15). Such analyses generate a pretty standard catalogue of recommendations - research funders should set aside extra time and money if they are to deliver problem-oriented and therefore interdisciplinary research; they should encourage universities to look favourably on those who pursue interdisciplinary careers; they should allow ‘more time for networking and building in an interdisciplinary element’ (Tait and Lyall 2001: 3), and so forth. Interdisciplinarity from the top down and the bottom up The accounts cited above are alike in supposing that requisite quantities and forms of interdisciplinarity will not happen automatically. Some kind of top down encouragement is apparently required to force disciplines to work together in order to address real world problems. Others argue that interdisciplinary research is important not to overcome the limits of disciplinary divisions but in order to enhance disciplinary development. For example, Conway suggests that ‘at its best and most creative, interdisciplinarity produces insights that were previously not perceived by the individual disciplines working alone’ (Conway 1995). Referring back to Abbott’s (2001) analysis of the ‘Chaos of Disciplines’, we might usefully think about interdisciplinary exchange as a mechanism of disciplinary evolution. The core territory of recognised disciplines is not stable, nor is it consistent between countries. There was, for instance, a time when physics was a new and innovative hybrid developing between mathematics and philosophy. Picking up similar themes, Blume (1990) considers the permeable boundaries of disciplinary identities and describes a typology of variously interdisciplinary forms of social science. He distinguishes, for instance, between ‘core’ disciplines (like sociology, history, anthropology) and ‘formal hybrids’ – such as social history, social psychology and social anthropology. In addition to these formal hybrids, he identifies a range of relatively well established applied fields like criminology. Blume’s final category includes composite areas such as cultural studies, leisure studies, science studies, women’s studies – these being recognisable entities but ones that draw upon multiple disciplinary traditions. The point is not simply that disciplines are themselves fluid – though that is significant. The more relevant observation is that disciplinary agendas co-evolve and that much creative borrowing and appropriation of concepts, ideas and even agendas 2 goes on without being explicitly recognised as ‘interdisciplinary’ activity. This raises the further question of what actually distinguishes between separate disciplines, particularly within the social sciences. Giddens, for example, suggests that there is no such thing as sociological theory - instead he argues that different specialisms contribute in different ways to the emergence of a more generic body of ‘social theory’. Blume goes on to suggest that the social sciences are held together by a common empirical point of reference, namely the social world. While social scientific disciplines construct their own subject matter by the way they frame and orient their central concerns, they nonetheless tap into shared experiences of everyday life. Both are contentious claims but both point to the web of connections that hold seemingly discrete disciplines together. One result is that there is endless potential for what we might think of as ‘bottom up’ interdisciplinary agenda setting. A recent meeting held at Cambridge University (Connected Space) illuminated and illustrated extensive theoretical overlap between contemporary archaeology, anthropology, architecture, sociology, geography and even art. Meetings of this kind are admittedly rare, but it is not at all uncommon for scholars to renew and refresh research agendas by seeking points of connection with colleagues in related fields. Whether from the top down or the bottom up, interdisciplinarity seems to be a thoroughly good thing. In the opening sections of ‘Interdisciplinarity in the Social Sciences’, Stuart Blume quotes Gusdorf who writes as follows: “Everyone invokes interdisciplinarity; no one dares say a word against it. Its success is all the more remarkable in that even those who advocate this new image of knowledge would find it hard to define. The appeal to interdisciplinarity is seen as a kind of epistemological panacea, designed to cure all the ills the scientific consciousness of our age is heir to” (Gusdorf 1977, 580) However, if interdisciplinarity is such a good thing, why do current institutional arrangements so consistently conspire against it? Why do calls for interdisciplinarity recur with such regularity? Why should interdisciplinary collaboration take more time and money? How are these extra resources spent and just how much extra is needed? How far is interdisciplinary interaction, in any event, a normal part of enriching scholarly debate? The policy documents referred to above distinguish between multi- and inter- disciplinarity, but persistently treat the latter as a monodimensional concept. Potentially important subtleties in how specific disciplines interact and in how real world problems are translated and resolved into researchable questions by specialists in different fields consequently fade from view. In the next part of the paper we take these questions forward by taking a more critical look at the
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